dear God, dear God,
we don’t know what to
make of this week.
Or last week.
Or next week.

So much sorrow surrounds us
even in the midst of the beauty of the day.
Grief
pain
broken windows, broken hearts, broken spines.
People held in place by a
heavy, brutal hand.
Bricks and mortar
bricks and stones
argued points
harsh words
history.
We think other people are ignorant and
they think we are,
a sharp crack in cultural understanding.
We lift up to you natural disasters and
human ones.

God, we witness destruction and
we know death,
distant and near.
Help us not to turn away.
Give us wisdom so that we might
speak well into sorrow,
that we might act with skill and compassion,
that we might mend old wounds
or at least stop wounding
or at least want to stop wounding.
We confess our sins,
for we have wounded.

Help us to turn our faces toward justice like we
lift them to sun on lovely spring day.
We cry out for a transcendent presence,
something greater than us,
something that asks us to be better
today than we were yesterday, to be better
tomorrow than we were today.

Jesus taught us to side with the oppressed.
May it be so
wherever we might find them.
May we find them.
May we seek them.
May we living according to your transcendent presence.
May we live into that world,
on earth as it is in heaven,
heaven on earth.
May we make it so.

Amen.